In communications systems, data may have different levels of transmission priority due to, e.g., the type of data to be transmitted, a priority level associated with the device from which the data is to be transmitted, a priority level associated with a user of the communications device seeking to transmit data and/or a priority level associated with the intended data recipient and/or device which is to receive the data.
While the reason data may be entitled to a particular priority level may vary, for purposes of providing a comparable data priority level, the priority of the data to be transmitted may be expressed in terms of a quality of service level to which the data to be transmitted is entitled to receive in the system. The quality of service level may be expressed as a one or multi-bit value depending on the system and/or the number of bits available for communicating quality of service level information.
To facilitate implementation of different levels of quality of service, it is useful for one or more devices in a communications system to know the quality of service level corresponding to the data to be communicated.
In peer to peer communications systems, where individual peer devices may make decisions on whether to proceed with data transmission or to respond to requests to transmit data, it would be useful if individual peer devices making the decisions had quality of service information available when making transmission related decisions.
Thus, it should be appreciated that there is a need for methods of facilitating communications between peer devices which would allow for the communication and/or use of quality of service level information.